Expanding upon a program already in place in Boston, Treasurer Deborah Goldberg on Wednesday launched a statewide salary negotiation training workshop program for women and committed to eventually spread the program nationwide.

The #JustAskMA program will aim to teach professional women how they can advocate for themselves during negotiations over salary and benefits to help chip away at the persistent gap between the average pay of a man and a woman performing the same work.

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The program is a collaboration between the Treasury, the state's 18 community colleges, the American Association of University Women, and the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women. The commission will select women to serve as training facilitators, the AAUW will train those facilitators to lead the workshops and then the community colleges will host the negotiation workshops.

"While the program alone will not close the wage gap, it is a very important piece of the multi-pronged solution to eliminate the wage gap and address decades -- and I mean decades -- of systematic disadvantage most women have faced in the workplace," Goldberg said in her office Wednesday morning.

Federal data released in September showed the median weekly earnings for Massachusetts women working full-time in 2016 were $932 -- or 84.3 percent of the $1,105 median for Massachusetts men. The gender pay gap has narrowed since 2015, when women earned 81.6 cents for every dollar a man earned.

From 1997 to 2016, the ratio in Massachusetts has trended upward, ranging from a low of 74.8 percent in 2007 to a high of 84.3 percent last year, according to the Regional Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Kim Churches, CEO of the AAUW, said the #JustAskMA program is modeled after a similar program Boston Mayor Martin Walsh launched. She said the Boston program has already trained 5,000 women how to better negotiate a fair salary and expects to train a total of 85,000 women over five years.

"While you can't completely negotiate your way around discrimination in the workplace, by learning how to expertly negotiate their pay and benefits women can begin to reach equal pay for equal work," she said. "We're already hearing stories of women on salaries earning 20 percent, 40 percent, 60 percent more after they just ask. And for our hourly wage earners sometimes $2 more an hour, $5 more an hour, $7 more an hour."

Acting Senate President Harriette Chandler joined Goldberg to announced the program and said the training will be critical because many women either don't know how to discuss wages or are embarrassed to raise the subject.

"We're uncomfortable and we always have been taught -- at least my generation has always been taught -- you don't talk about salaries," Chandler said. "Well, that's over and that's done with. Salary negotiations now have to be something that is open, transparent and we need to learn from each other."

Goldberg said the #JustAskMA program is the first statewide salary negotiation training program in the country and that she wants to expand it across the nation as long as it proves successful in Massachusetts.

"Now we're ready to launch, ready to work with our friends," she said as she wrapped up her press conference. "I am committed to helping launch this nationally once it is piloted out and effective here, and that will make a difference in our entire country."

Gov. Charlie Baker in August 2016 signed a law to prevent pay discrimination based on gender for comparable work. Under the law, employers are no longer allowed to require applicants to provide their salary history before receiving a formal job offer but are permitted to take attributes of an employee or applicant into account when determining variation in pay, such as their work experience, education or job training.